Carnival
by BlackFingerlessGloves
Summary: "We live in a constant loop: children are born, raised, educated, employed and buried. Alternate paths are unheard of. A birth certificate is a death sentence here." Gwen Stevens was stuck. Then the carnival came.


**Hello!**

**Alright, I know that you will probably want my head on a plate for starting a new story, when my current one are in desperate need for a new chapter. But this idea just came to me in the dead of the night and I simply had to write it down before it exploded within me! Okay, that was probably exaggerated.**

**Anyways, I am sorely lacking inspiration for my current endeavors, so they probably won't be updated as soon as I hoped. Thank you all for waiting for me, anyway. This is kinda long, and I worked a bit on this. I haven't written in the first person for a long time now, and returning to it has sparked a flurry of flowing words that laced together as sentences and eventually came as one in the form of this beginning chapter. See? I'm talking in the first person now, and I'm rambling.**

**Apologies for the last few bits. I really wanted this finished so it may be a little bit choppy in contrast to the rest of the chapter.**

**OK, please read on.**

**Read, Review and Enjoy!**

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><p>I never liked carnivals. They pulled up at the curb of a city and begged for a place to stay like some stray puppy. They polluted perfectly peaceful patches of grass with blinding lights, crooked games and empty promises of some form of escape from the real world. Where mindless, materialistic citizens gave in to their constant need to squander money, merhants and rollercoaster testers cashed in to support their barely there livelihoods. They bring a city to is knees with showbags and cotton candy, bleed it dry of every last penny that would've been better off in a safe, and take off without any notice. While children's dreams of forever are shattered and the lollies go stale, they ride off into the sunset on deflating tyres, onto the next adventure.<p>

My name is Gwen Stevens, and before January I was the town's loner. Contrary to popoular belief, I actually have ears, and I do happen to hear the things people whisper a bit too loud to be actually trying to conceal it. The bubbly, overethusiastic girls have made it somehwat of a hobby of theirs to generate theories as to why I refuse to confrom to society's standards. It's like a drug. They sit in a circle and share their precious bong of hypothesis, feeding on the rebelliousness of speaking about someone when they aren't present. It's quite flattering actually, and in another repsect completely saddening: this town's sterotypical defintions of perfection source their amusement from marvelling over a girl who is deemed different just because she isn't a flouro coalition of happy, and prefers emotional guitar riffs to superficial, sex obsessed computer noises. Excuse me for having an opinion.

I live in a small town, so everyone happens to know everyone, and the slightest change becomes common knowledge come morning. I guess that's what makes me so imfamous. Every street is lined with picket fences, where little Suzy and Jonny go out to splash in the sprinklers before dinner. It was really the emobodiment of perfection- well for some people. The cheerleaders from school live next door (quite literally), and the town jocks have already claimed ownership of our humble little piece of suburbia. It's incredibly confining.

We live in a contant loop: children are born, raised, educated, employed and buried. Alternate paths are unheard of. A birth certificate is a death sentence here. No one leaves this town; whether it be to uphold a family business or simply because they don't have the backbone to speak up for themsevles, everyone ends up taking the places of our elders.

And there I was: Senior year and trying my best to exile myself from the hold of this place before it engulfed me completely. Needless to say, I didn't think I'd be missed. I just needed to find a way how and I would be up and gone. My parents wouldn't mind- they're just like the whole population: wondering just where in the mapped out process of childhood I took a wrong turn. I had one foot outside the town border already.

It was late afternoon. The day's serving of algebra, pep rally announcements upon cafteria tables and locker slamming was over for another twenty four hours, and I had my time completely to myself. The single source of sunlight of my room saw my exausted figure slump upon it in a pile of flesh and bones. My ebony hair stuck to the window, and I was pretty sure that I had worn my LostAlone t-shirt three days in a row now.

I reached for my sketch book and a sharpened pencil. It took me a while to flip over to a blank page, and even longer to find something to be inspired by; perfection wasn't really a mecca for creativity.

A few minutes passed, and all I had done was scribble my signature in the corner of the page. I always sign my pieces before I actually start skecthing. I like to think I own everything I create, and own it comepletely. From the moment I imprinted my initials in the most cursive script I could manage, it was mine. Even when it was completely blank, it was still mine entirely. I owned the lack of inspiration, the emptiness, the potential waiting to be unlocked. I owned the paper's complete lifespan- the ticking of my mind. The process of imagination to structure to completion to error to correction to erasing- it was all mine and mine alone. And when I finished a sketch, I owned it even before its inception. I owned my train of thought before it was even thought of. I owned my brain. A lot of people in this town only take the finished product. They don't take it upon themselves to put the effort into making their lives perfect. They take it on a silver platter, no questions asked.

Just as I touched my pencil to paper, it came. Like a wet, lost, unwanted puppy, it came. The carnival rolled in, right infront of my house and my heavy eyes. I saw the ferris wheel, tied down to a trailer with about a million pieces of rope. I saw the stores on wheels, the cotton candy, the happiness and poppiness that always managed to get on my nerves. It's not that I'm impervious to joy- I just prefer it genuine and provoked by something rather than sculpted and forced down my throat.

The infectious music filled the air of the town, and one by one doors opened and children screamed and parents soothed, and hundreds of promises were made, and hundreds of dollars were gone before the notes even left their wallets. It was sickening.

As if on cue, my father opened the door to my room. I turned around abruptly to face him. He blinked rapidly as if to adjust his eyes to the dimmness of my room, but we both knew it was just his way of telling me to brighten up and be like everyone else; he certainly was. He was still in his work suit: printed tie, white shirt and sleek black pants. He was an accountant.

"Gwen," he started. "Your mother and I are going to the carnival. We'd like you to join us." He was always separate from me. We just lived in different worlds. He wanted his only daughter to have decadent blonde hair, to dance with him at her debutant ball, to wear a chastity ring and have a boyfriend that he could chased down the street with a revolver. I wanted to draw enough sketches to plaster my bedroom walls with, to learn the guitar and write music that would fill arenas, to make a difference. I wasn't going to do that being like everyone else.

I frowned at him. "I don't really want to. It's commericalism at it's poppiest." I replied. It was a very rare occasion that the tone of my voice differed. I was like a broken record.

My father narrowed his eyes. "That wasn't a request, Gwendolyn. You're mother hasn't made dinner so we're eating at the carnival"

"But-"

"Be ready in five minutes." He gave me one last look and closed the door behind him. Sometimes I felt bad that I didn't live up to his dream of fatherhood. Occasionally he gave me those looks that just tore me to shreds, and today was one of those days. His eyes were desperate; they're the same colour as mine. Where mine are always straight and unfocused, the same shade of black pleaded with their daughter's with no words at all. It always interested me. Our unspoken conversations seemed to talk the loudest.

His begging irises fresh in my mind, I put my sketchbook (the page was still blank), my wallet and my keys into my bag. Zipping it shut, I straightened out my t-shirt out and exited the refuge of my room.

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><p>The carnival was loud, unessecary and everything I invisioned it to be. Screaming children dragged their parents by the hands to countless colourful stalls. Dogs seized a child's momentry lapse in concentration to get their next meal, and mine came in the form of a soggy corn dog and cloying cotton candy.<p>

After a stale meal with my parents, I bade them farewell and decided to roam the place solo. I promised I would be home by midnight, and gave them both a kiss on the cheek. Perhaps that was enough for them to have the "parenting a teenager" experience they so depserately craved. I considered breaking my promised curfew just for their chance to dicipline me.

I didn't bother with the games, knowing that any money given there would never be reciprocated in the form of novelty items due to the scams that occurred under the ignorant's noses. I just walked around aimlessly, eyeing children going on rides and either buzzing or throwing up afterwards. It was this imagery that was in my mind by the time I got to the rollercoaster.

As expected, the line for the amusement ride was longer than the circumference of the rollercoaster's climatic loop, and patrons were positively excited to be strapped in and shot across a track at eighty miles an hour. Everyone was either breathing heavily in fear or squealing in anticipation, and quite frankly, it was extremely movie-like.

I was just about to turn around and make my way home (three hours before my curfew, my poor parents), when the most fluid voice captured my ears and took them on a rollercoaster ride of their own.

"Want a ride?"

It came from the guy who was manning the ride. He looked extremely shifty and in any sterotypical situation he would've been the ones children warned them about conversing with. His skulled t-shirt looked extremely worn out, and his fading blue jeans didn't look too new either. The red converses on his feet looked like they were about to fall apart, and his face was stapled with shining piercings. What was the most interesting thing, however, was the lime green Mohawk that hung limply to the ride side of his head. It would've looked very intimidating had it been secured with fifteen hundred layers of hair product, but judging by his appearance, it didn't seem like he could afford it.

"No." I replied. "Unlike nintey nine percent of my rundown home I don't relish the idea of being trapped in a poorly manufactured cart and driven down a track with no solid promise of making it out alive." Once again, my voice failed to go up even a semitone, however the guy seemed comepletely bemused at my flat remark.

"Ouch!" he replied, placing a calloussed hand to his heart. He let five extremely loud girls pass through the ride and into a cart before addressing me again. "You don't give me enough credit, Sunshine."

I snorted.

"Sunshine?" The nickname seemed so off, that I almost wanted to refer him to the local optomestrist. He grinned in the most annoying way before explaining:

"It's called a contrast. It's normally used to induce irony or some sort of comedic relief in a situation of comeplete hostility."

His reply completely baffled me.

"Wow. You don't really look the type to own such an extensive vocabulary."

It was like running water. His combacks just kept coming and coming. I was impressed.

"Well, maybe you should open your eyes and see beyond appearances." I was completely taken aback. I had never really been intellectually challanged before. Sure, I was sort of smart, but I'd never had a stimulating conversation. I'd just met this rollercoaster owner, and already we'd used words that exceeded four syllables. It was much more than I could say about everyone else in this town.

I looked at my watch.

"I'm going home." He grinned again- that same grin that seemed to reign upon his pointed chin. Letting five more patrons into the cart, he turned to me and chuckled.

"Why? Too scared to be driven down a track with no solid promise of getting out alive, or whatever you said? Who cares? You don't get out of life alive, so may as well live while there's breath in your lungs."

I inhaled sharply.

"Fear is useless. It restrains us and gives us an excuse to do nothing. I'm not scared; our defintions of living merely differer greatly."

He ran a hand through his slumping hair.

"Do they?"

I narrowed my eyes at him, wondering what on earth he meant. Instead of standing still for five minutes trying to decipher his words, I turned around and decided to go home.

"Good night." I said sharply.

I walked away briskly and faintly heard him yell his name out after me. I was so far away that I didn't get all the letters- I know it started with a D or something. He interested me. Unlike everyone in this town, he had something of an opinion. He didn't coil away at one taste of my monotonousness. He challenged me. I haven't had a challenge in a long time.

When I arrived home I went straight to my bedroom and fell onto my bed. I briefly remember sketching the outline of a slumping Mohwak before being snatched from this world and into another.

I dreamt of flahsing lights.

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><p><strong>You like?<strong>

**Tell me in a review!**

**I promise I will work hard to update my impending stories. However, should this new one take up my creative juices, I have been considering letting someone take the wheels of some. Just tell me in a review or PM me. Stories up for grabs are:**

**Beyond the Trailer  
>Heart Full of Songs<strong>

**If you do want to have custody of them I will give you the story, as well as my plans for them, should it be applicable.  
>I'm incredibly sorry about this, but should I get into this one too much, I may have to sacrifice one for its own good. <strong>

**Let me know. **

**BFG**


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